This is by Ruth Rendell. It was published in 2006, and it's her 55th whodunit... Yikes.

Here we have two sisters, Ismay (24) and Heather (22). Nine years ago, their stepfather, Guy, ended up drowned in the bathtub. The verdict was accidental death. But this outcome came about partly because their mother, Beatrix, lied about Heather's whereabouts. She said her two daughters had been with her on a shopping trip, whereas actually Heather had been at home at the crucial time, and her dress had been wet when the others got back...

We learn that Guy had been a bit of a sleazeball, toying with the confused sexuality of the young Ismay (she was 13 when he arrived in the household). Heather had witnessed some of his moves, and Ismay's theory has always been that Heather had killed Guy in order to protect her.

But it's never talked about. The house is eventually remodelled, to remove the bathroom of dark memories. Ismay and Heather live in one bit; Beatrix (mentally ill since the drowning) lives with her sister, Pamela, in the other.

And all is well until Heather meets this really nice guy, called Edmund, and Ismay starts to wonder if she should tell him about the murder suspicions...

What?? So much reticence, and then you want to spill the beans (which are possibly no beans at all) to a total newcomer? And you do it by recording a cassette (a cassette??) that you may or may not give him, with the result that it floats around just begging to get into the wrong hands...?

So I'm already finding the plotting a bit weird...



Plus, the characters are either flat or larger than life. In the first category is Ismay herself. She didn't come across as beautiful enough or interesting enough or really anything enough to attract Andrew Campbell-Sedge, the pantomime-villain of a character she has fallen catastrophically in love with. True, he's a serial conqueror of young blond women, which is all part of his manipulative, controlling, and fundamentally unfaithful persona. Vulnerability is therefore something he looks out for. But nothing we're told about Ismay lets her hold a candle to ACS's next conquest, Eva. Whatever the comparison, Ismay is heart-broken at being dumped, and Heather tries to persuade Eva (whom she doesn't know from Adam) to give her new guy up. Again, really?? This plot point is there to cast new doubt over Heather. But it's all very creaky, it seems to me.

Also in the larger-than-life category is Irene, Edmund's awful mother. One of the book's more sympathetic developments is the way he gradually extracts himself from her all-enveloping hypochondria, and moves in with Heather, who comes across as really pretty nice.

There's another character who falls in the bordering-on-caricature category, but I must admit I had a soft spot for her. She's Marion, a professional opportunist with an extensive repertoire of ways to take advantage of older people. She's completely amoral, but her perennial bad luck makes you kind of like her (her murder bid doesn't work out because her scrounging brother has replaced the morphine with cough mixture, and her attempt to ingratiate herself with an elderly Muslim goes wrong when she presents him with a huge leg of ham).


Bayswater. Our characters know London like the back of their hand

There's a further feature that's naggingly disconcerting. The novel is clearly and specifically set in the early years of the 21st century, and yet it somehow has the feel of a much older book. Whether it's the technology or the morals, the impression throughout is of a time mismatch (you can find details here and here). Rendell was 76 when she wrote it. But surely you have editors to pick up on this kind of thing...

There's a slightly flat "solution" (to the puzzle of what actually happened to Guy), and knocking off a couple of characters in the 2004 tsunami felt like a terrible cop-out. On the plus side, Rendell does keep the tension up, and I did want to read to the end.

All in all, though, One Across, Two Down was a much better book.